After Shatrughan Sinha, Sushant Singh Rajput was probably the first actor from the state who could find space as the leading man The house in Rajiv Nagar — a middle-class locality in north Patna — is exactly the sort of place that a government servant’s family would occupy. It’s also the kind of place that […]

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Basu Chatterjee’s legacy is the endearing depiction of middle-class life shorn of melodrama Urban India’s middle-class young man of the 1970s wasn’t always a brooding figure; he wasn’t always angry. And he wasn’t always weighed down by questions of alienation and existence. He could struggle, yet walk with a purposeful gait. His anxieties could be […]

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India-England women’s T20 World Cup semi-final is the latest example of the governing body’s lack of foresight THERE ARE ways in which moments of travesty can be turned into misplaced validation. A recent example was how Indian cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle reacted to South African women’s cricket team captain, Dané Van Niekerk, saying she would […]

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New Delhi has gravitated towards other regional groupings in recent years, but it has always used SAARC to achieve specific aims On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted a video conference with leaders of the countries comprising the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation for sharing strategies as well as exploring possibilities of a regional […]

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Like the selectivity infested news media, the online cottage industry of political satire has chosen to see only what it wants to see IN THE seventeenth century, English thinker Thomas Hobbes, analysing human nature for his work on political philosophy, observed something about the instincts that drive people to make fun of others, in covert […]

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AAP making fun of Manoj Tiwari’s Bhojpuri work betrays cultural insensitivity A FEW days into the campaign for the Delhi Assembly election, the Aam Aadmi Party had its Sidharth Malhotra moment. Its rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, denounced a series of videos posted by AAP and its leaders mocking the BJP’s Delhi unit chief Manoj […]

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England’s success and star appeal of its players is a welcome change from the cloying subcontinent fixation that world cricket has run into A day before the final of the cricket World Cup this year, I was asked during a panel discussion to pick the team that I would like to win the coveted quadrennial […]

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How efficient can policing be as a bulwark against the most brutal side of human nature? “She lay there, punctured by multiple stabbing wounds, one screwdriver still wedged into her flesh. She appeared abandoned by all of us.” Almost 13 years ago, this was how Tuktuk Ghosh, an Indian Administrative Service officer, described the gruesome […]

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